Environmental historian Karl Jacoby restores memory. Personal memories
help fuel his work, and historical memory shapes it. If, as is often
said, history is written by the winners, the reason is that winners
control our collective memory. They determine which documents are
preserved and honored, which incidents are forgotten, and which are
important. "Violence," Jacoby has written, "may begin as a contest over
resources, but it often ends as a contest over meaning, as the
participants struggle to articulate what has happened to them—and what
they have, in turn, done to others."

Kathleen Dooher

For a century after the Camp Grant Massacre, Jacoby says, Apaches rarely spoke to outsiders about it.

Our
most widely accepted version of history—what today's historians like to
call the "dominant narrative" of the past—tends to be a tidier and more
consistent version of events than what actually happened. Winners need
to believe that their victory is just and deserved, and historians have
often provided an apt storyline. Popular history demands heroes and
villains, and narratives without messy tangents. Whether it describes
frontier settlers bringing progressive democracy to the American West
or environmentalists saving the empty wilderness from the depredations
of mining and oil companies, the narrative explains who we are, or
justifies who we think we are.

The problem is that, like the Communist officials in Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,
this dominant narrative can airbrush out inconvenient facts and
memories, particularly when it comes to the history of the American
West. The newest generation of U.S. historians is for the most part
engaged in unearthing these facts and memories and adding them to the
storyline. Historians often discover these anomolies accidentally,
while looking for something better known. Jacoby's first book, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation,
began with just such a forgotten document, a letter sent by a Havasupai
Indian to authorities complaining that since game wardens had begun
patrolling his hunting grounds, deer seemed to have become less
abundant, and he didn't understand why. "It's very rare," Jacoby says,
"to find letters from Native Americans in the archives. Here was this
forgotten voice, and I needed to understand why he was complaining
about this game warden."

Jacoby's research for Crimes Against Nature led him to
conclude that one of our most comforting narratives—the visionary
creation of our national parks— is incomplete at best. The book fills
in the social history of rural America that the history of conservation
usually neglects. Crimes Against Nature, which won the American
Historical Association's Littleton-Griswold Prize as 2001's best book
on law and society, suggests that, while the parks may have been
"America's Best Idea," as Ken Burns describes them in his latest
documentary series, implementing that idea had important social costs
to Native Americans and poor whites.

This matters because the vision of wilderness that underlies our
national parks is one of ecosystems without people, and once it was
encoded into law rural populations living within the parks had to be
either displaced or rigidly controlled. The Havasupai Indian
complaining about a game warden, for example, was really objecting to
the presence of new game laws that overrode the hunting practices the
tribe had been using for millennia. Using Yellowstone—our first
national park—as an example, Jacoby writes, "The vision of nature that
the park's backers sought to enact—nature as pre-human wilderness—was
predicated on eliminating any Indian presence from the Yellowstone
landscape." And: "Drawing upon a familiar vocabulary of discovery and
exploration, the authors of the early accounts of the Yellowstone
region literally wrote Indians out of the landscape, erasing Indian
claims by reclassifying inhabited territory as empty wilderness." No
wonder, as Jacoby writes later in the book, "conservation was for
Native Americans inextricably bound up with conquest."

Jacoby's book was disquieting to many conservationists, particularly
because it was published just as President George W. Bush was rolling
back many environmental protections. "Keep this book away from
officials in the Bush administration's Interior Department," one
reviewer warned. But Jacoby insists that his job is to offer a fuller,
more complex version of history, regardless of its political
implications. "Environmental history grew up originally in the shadow
of the environmental movement," Jacoby says, "and grew up writing the
history of the environmental movement as very much a sort of
cheerleader. My book and some others are an attempt at writing a
somewhat more self-aware history of that movement. It doesn't help us
not to have the full history."

If Crimes Against Nature implies that our history is inextricably tied to our mythmaking, Jacoby's second book, Shadows at Dawn: A Borderland Massacre and the Violence of History,
published last November, ups the ante. What if the practice of history
itself is biased? If history is based on documentary evidence and is
primarily an analysis of known facts, what's a historian to do when
confronted with populations whose documents are paintings on a cave
wall or carvings on a stick? How can a historian accurately describe
the facts of a massacre when the memories of its victims died with
them? "No one," Primo Levi has written, "ever returned to describe his
own death."

Karl Jacoby

The landscape near the mouth of Aravaipa Canyon.

"I am interested in a new social history," Jacoby says, "a history
told from below and not just from the point of view of the elites." Shadows at Dawn
focuses on the Camp Grant Massacre of April 30, 1871, which took place
in Aravaipa Canyon sixty miles northeast of Tucson in the Arizona
Territory not far from the U.S. border with Mexico. For roughly thirty
minutes just after dawn that day, a group of Anglo Americans, Mexican
Americans, and Tohono O'odham Indians raided an encampment in the
canyon, killing as many as 144 Apaches, most of them women and
children, and taking twenty-nine captives. Although it was not the
worst massacre of Native Americans in U.S. history, it was one of the
most widely discussed in its time, occurring as it did during the
"Peace Policy" of the Grant administration. That policy, Jacoby writes,
"broke with a number of previous federal practices, especially by
attributing conflicts with Indian peoples to avoidable American
injustices rather than to some inherent Native American 'savageness.'"

By telling his story from below, Jacoby portrays both Indians and whites with unusual insight and subtlety. Although Shadows at Dawn
explicitly sets out to reverse the portrayal, in countless Westerns and
many histories, of Apaches as ruthless, evil raiders, his bottom-up
approach portrays whites and their motivations with surprising empathy.
This is no small accomplishment. After all, the massacre's leaders were
prominent Tucson citizens; one would be elected to the city's
four-person governing council and become the local sheriff. Although
the participants in the Camp Grant Massacre were arrested and tried,
the jury deliberated just nineteen minutes before finding them
innocent. Even the district attorney trying the case had been involved
in some of the planning meetings for the attack on the Apaches.

Clearly, the Peace Policy hadn't changed many attitudes in the Arizona
borderlands. In one particularly relevant irony, some of the massacre's
participants would found the organization that later became the Arizona
Historical Society, the main repository of the state's historical
documents. There is still a park in Tucson named after one of the
massacre's leaders.

By his own admission, Jacoby's book was a dark one to write, more so,
perhaps, because it is not a simple moral condemnation of violence
against Native Americans. Shadows at Dawn,
which comes out in paperback this November, is an account of
conflicting worldviews, of the way different cultures can look at the
same physical landscape and read into it different, and often
irreconcilable meanings. Jacoby asks not only how the Camp Grant
Massacre could happen; he describes how the event became absorbed into
the histories of the different cultures involved in it and how their
memory of it helped shape those cultures afterward. He does this by
adopting the novelistic device of narrating his story in chapters
written from the point of view of each of the four cultures involved in
the massacre as perpetrators or victims: Anglo-American,
Mexican-American, O'odham, and Apache.

"For novelists," Jacoby says, "having four competing points of view is
nothing new. But historians like to have a linear narrative."
Historians study different points of view and integrate them into a
singular story line, making broad, omniscient judgments along the way.
"I wanted to try to tell the story using four different narratives.
Because of this, there isn't really this sense of moral outrage, or at
least it's not overwhelming. What you discover is how foreign and other
the other groups seem to each of them. The absolute truth is found in
the juxtaposition of all these realities."

Shadows at Dawn, then, is more William Faulkner than Zane Grey.
The book reads like true tragedy, a collision of forces that seems
inevitable, evidence of what the Princeton scholar William Howarth
called "lucid madness" in his American Scholar review of the
book. Jacoby's narrative is divided into three main sections. The
first, "Violence," consists of four chapters, each tracing the broad
sweep of history of these four cultures in North America; for the two
Indian groups, the O'odham (also known as the Pima and Papago Indians)
and the Apache (or the Nn–e–e–, as they are called in the book) this
history extends back to their creation stories.

The technical and scholarly accomplishment of these chapters is
remarkable. Because the historical documents come largely from the
European cultures, the danger is that the chapters about European
descendents would be richly detailed while those focused on the Native
American groups could seem sketchy by comparison. But Jacoby has dug
deep, teasing out references to Native culture and testimony in Anglo
and Spanish documents, and tracking down O'odham "calendar sticks,"
ribs of saguaro cactus on which important yearly events were noted by a
village historian. Early anthropologists had dismissed the events
recorded on calendar sticks as village gossip, but Jacoby uses them as
an indicator of what mattered most to villagers during particular
years. For example, the O'odham found Mexico's sale of their land to
the United States in the 1850s so unimportant that calendar sticks of
the time failed to note it at all, instead recording more immediate
threats. "The Apaches came to steal horses and brought a live vulture
with them," one stick noted. "They were discovered and several killed."

"Justice," the second and briefest section of the book—it's only
eight pages long—describes the one-day trial of the massacre's 100
participants. Because the Apaches in the canyon were under the
protection of the U.S. Army at the time, the region's military
commander believed the massacre to be an act of war against the United
States, but, as Jacoby writes, "to many of the region's residents, it
was not clear that the killing of Apache women and children in Aravaipa
Canyon constituted a crime at all."

The third section of Shadows at Dawn, "Memory," re-turns to
the four-points-of-view structure of "Violence" by tracing the
massacre's aftermath up to the present day. Summing up his approach,
Jacoby writes, "We can judge these accounts for their faithfulness to
an always incomplete historical record, and we can acknowledge that all
attempts to narrate the past are at once processes of remembering and
forgetting, in which the creation of a coherent story is achieved by
prioritizing certain events over others. But we cannot confine
ourselves to a single one of these narratives without enacting yet
another form of historical violence: the suppression of the past's
multiple meanings."

Courtesy National Archives

John Clum, center, sits with a group of Apaches.

What are these meanings? Their contrasting substance is vividly
depicted in the maps that open every chapter. The same arid landscape,
the same canyons and riverbeds have completely different names and
boundaries. For the Anglo-Americans they represented a landscape of
freedom and self-determination, an obligation to spread civilization.
"If you can make Quakers out of the Indians it will take the fight out
of them," President Grant supposedly said. To the Spanish and, later,
the Mexicans, the countryside represented a different form of
civilizing influence that Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries out to
convert the Indians had pioneered. To the O'odham, a tribe with several
diverse branches, the Sonoran desert was the ancestral farmland and the
territory on which they hunted and gathered food.

For the O'odham, first contact with Europeans meant disease and
competition for scarce water. Yet the O'odham sometimes allied
themselves with the Mexicans, and, later, the Americans, against a
common enemy, the Apaches, who as hunters and opportunists, survived by
taking what they needed from others, whether horses or livestock. This
was how the Apaches had always lived, by their wits, and Jacoby
theorizes that when they first encountered horses or other ranch
animals that had gone feral, the Apaches saw the displaced livestock as
a new type of game.

What's clear from Shadows at Dawn is how remote was the
possibility that such radically different cultures could ever find much
common ground. What seems truly extraordinary is how the Apaches and
other Native Americans have managed to survive to this day, given the
overwhelming transformation their world underwent. O'odham and Apache
society, for example, was based mostly on family ties. The idea of a
king or a president, of a ruler of all people across a continent, was
completely incomprehensible. Similarly, when the U.S. Army believed it
was signing a treaty with a tribe, the Apaches believed they were
signing an agreement valid only for their band. What other families or
villages did was neither their concern nor under their control. Even
the concept of tribe seems in this case to have been an artifact of a
government trying to impose an order that felt familiar and close to
its own.

Each of the four cultural groups Jacoby describes saw the others as
the true barbarians. Because Apaches took what they needed without
regard to private property, Mexicans and Americans saw them as lawless.
Native societies, meanwhile, had elaborate rules about battle and
revenge and justice. Killing was followed by elaborate purification
ceremonies, during which the attributes of the killed were incorporated
into the spirit of the warriors. (In fact, the Camp Grant Massacre
victims were mostly women and children because the men were on such a
purification ritual elsewhere in the canyon at the time.) That whites,
on the other hand, hanged people by the neck and thought little of it
afterward was, to Apaches, a sign of true barbarism.

The arid and violent landscape along the Arizona-Mexico border is a far
cry from the green and wooded hills of Concord, Massachusetts, where
Karl Jacoby grew up. Jacoby attended public schools in Concord and
might have grown up to be like any other suburban kid—if it hadn't been
for his grandfather.

Jacoby's maternal grandfather grew up in Queens but developed lung
problems as he aged and sought out a dry climate. He wound up moving to
a small farm in Alamos, Mexico, at the southern end of Sonora province.
There, Jacoby's grandfather and grandmother lived in an adobe house and
raised much of their own food. Chickens scratched dirt in the yard. "I
think of him a lot as the old gringo in the Carlos Fuentes novel,"
Jacoby says of his grandfather.

Beginning when he was two years old, Jacoby and his family used to
visit relatives in Phoenix and then make their way south across the
border into Mexico. It was, he says, less like traveling across the
border of two countries than traveling back through a century. He'd
visit for two weeks at a time, attending the local school in Alamos.
"It was a classic one-room school," he recalls. "Sometimes there were
two of us to a desk. It seemed very much like a school from the 1930s."

It was odd, he says, to "parachute into these schools and then leave
again." In grammar school, he had difficulty joining the local games.
Wooden tops set spinning with a string were all the rage, and Jacoby
fumbled unsuccessfully to join in. In junior high, his classmates
assumed that as an American he would be a first-rate basketball and
baseball player, but in fact he was a mediocre athlete, except for
soccer. He describes himself as a "studious, bookish kid."

By the time Jacoby entered high school, his grandfather had died,
and his parents believed the weeks away from school in Concord were too
disruptive, so the trips to visit his grandmother in Alamos became less
frequent. But they had created a strong impression that would help
later determine Jacoby's choice of career and even his subject matter.
The trip through time, the stories about Geronimo and other Apaches,
the contrasts between Mexican and Southwestern Anglo culture—these he
felt compelled to try to understand. "Shadows at Dawn," he says, "is that little kid trying to understand that landscape."

Arizona Historical Society/Tucson

Sidney DeLong was elected Tucson's mayor only weeks after participating in the massacre.

When it was time to pick a college, he chose Brown after visiting a
class in abnormal psychology. Although it was a large lecture class, he
says the professor taught in part using the Socratic method. "People
were up there," he recalls, "throwing out ideas and dialoguing with the
professor. I was hugely impressed that the students were so engaged,
and the professor was pushing the students in ways that I had never
seen. That was the kind of student I wanted to be, even though in fact
I was kind of shy."

His first year on campus was difficult, as it is for many Brown
students. "I found my first year pretty hard academically," he says. "I
thought that with my academic background I'd do okay, but I found that
in order to do well I had to work much harder than I had in high
school." He became a history concentrator, taking courses from such
professors as Jim Patterson, Naomi Lamoreaux, Howard Chudacoff, and the
late Jack Thomas. (To Jacoby's regret, he never took a course with
Gordon Wood.) In his spare time, he became a disc jockey at WBRU and
met the woman who would become his wife, the future novelist Marie
Myung-Ok Lee '86. Under the supervision of Chudacoff and education
professor Herman Eschenbacher, he wrote his honors thesis on the
history of Rhode Island education.

After Brown, Jacoby considered graduate school, but instead moved to
New York City and took a job as an editorial assistant for Farrar,
Straus and Giroux (FSG). There he read manuscripts, wrote reports on
them, and helped shepherd some through production. Because he was one
of the few people at FSG at the time who could read Spanish, he helped
with the production of novels by Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa.
It was a heady time. David Rieff worked in the office, and his mother,
Susan Sontag, sometimes dropped in. Another fellow editorial assistant
was Rick Moody '83, who was writing his first novel, Garden State. Jacoby played on the publishing house's softball team, and among the young authors on the team was novelist Jonathan Franzen.

Most significant, though, was Jacoby's work at Hill & Wang, FSG's
academic imprint. There Jacoby met the pioneering environmental
historian William Cronon, who was then at Yale. Jacoby had read
Cronon's classic work, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England,
while he was at Brown, and in talks with Cronon, he began to realize
that it might be possible to have a professional life focused on
landscape as an element of history.

Working at FSG, Jacoby says, demystified the process of writing a book,
so much so that he decided he wanted to write one himself. "I realized
from talking to Bill [Cronon] that there was this growing interest in
the West and the environment. And because my childhood experiences had
shown me things that were not in the history books, I felt they had
given birth to a potentially serious subject for history." He decided
to apply to graduate school and was accepted to study with Cronon at
Yale. Marie Lee, who had been working on Wall Street, quit her job to
write full-time, and the couple moved to New Haven.

Jacoby received his PhD in 1997. His dissertation was the first draft of Crimes Against Nature.
The following year, as he rewrote his book, he worked as a visiting
professor at Oberlin College, and the year after that, he became an
assistant professor of history at Brown. Jacoby believes that,
intellectually, he has come full circle at Brown. He discovered
environmental history as an undergraduate studying with Jack Thomas,
and he believes he has returned to help the discipline mature and
develop. Jacoby also takes great pride in his development as a teacher.
He has worked hard to overcome his natural shyness and likes to note
that he has won the William G. McLoughlin Teaching Award for Excellence
in the Social Sciences. Last year 140 students enrolled in his
environmental history course.

Shadows at Dawn has already collected a few history prizes, and
it is under consideration for more this fall. In May it won a Special
Recognition award at the annual RFK Book Awards in Washington, D.C.,
narrowly missing out on the top prize, which was given to TheNew Yorker's Jane Mayer for The Dark Side, her report on the War on Terror. In September, Jacoby learned that the American Society for Ethnohistory had chosen Shadows at Dawn
as the best new book in that field. The reviews have also been good.
The novelist Larry McMurtry, while praising the book, including its
detailed glossary, in the New York Review of Books gushed, "I
once wrote about the Camp Grant Massacre myself and think now that I'd
rather have Professor Jacoby's glossary than my whole essay."

Meanwhile, Jacoby has already begun his next project, which will again
focus on history along the U.S.–Mexico border. The subject is less
grim, he says, adding that he could not follow Shadows at Dawn
with another depressing subject. The book will stay with him, of
course, though its effect on altering our perceptions of the American
West may be confined to academic circles for the time being.

During the final stages of writing the book, Jacoby traveled to
Aravaipa Canyon to see what remains of the massacre site. Nearby are
the Aravaipa Villa RV Park and a branch campus of Central Arizona
College. Most of the nearby land is owned by the federal Bureau of Land
Management and the Nature Conservancy and is managed as a national
wilderness. The actual massacre site is not a part of this land—tribal
historian Dale Miles would later take him there—but the vast wilderness
area, he writes in Shadows at Dawn,
"has helped solidify public perception of Aravaipa as untouched
nature." When he asked the ranger at the entrance to the canyon about
the massacre site, the man said, "Far more people come out here for
nature than for history."

Thanks to Jacoby, the memories of the dead will linger for another generation, for a few of us at least.

For information about Shadows at Dawn, including scans of of documents Jacoby used to write it, click here. Norman Boucher is editor of the BAM.

Comments (3)

10/14/09

This fine article by Norman Boucher gives great insight into the remarkable young historian that Karl Jacoby is. Brown is lucky and I'm sure proud to have him in their History Department. Last April I had read his latest book and living in Tucson chose to visit Aravaipa Canyon before attending my 50th reunion in May. I visited with Karl after attending the History Department's graduation ceremony at his suggestion. I was very pleased to hear it announced that day that he had been advanced to full professorship. I eagerly await his next book but his type of exacting scholarship takes time. The result I am confident will be well worth the wait.

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10/20/09

The correct link for the companion website is http://brown.edu/Research/Aravaipa/. It is well worth a visit.

Helen Wolfe Dewey 1970

10/20/09

Thanks. We've repaired the link.

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